Related papers: The species problem and its logic: Inescapable Amb…
If predictions for species extinctions hold, then the `tree of life' today may be quite different to that in (say) 100 years. We describe a technique to quantify how much each species is likely to contribute to future biodiversity, as…
Language learners must learn the meanings of many thousands of words, despite those words occurring in complex environments in which infinitely many meanings might be inferred by the learner as a word's true meaning. This problem of…
Modeling a sequence of design steps, or a sequence of parameter settings, yields a sequence of dynamical systems. In many cases, such a sequence is intended to approximate a certain limit case. However, formally defining that limit turns…
In the artificial intelligence area, one of the ultimate goals is to make computers understand human language and offer assistance. In order to achieve this ideal, researchers of computer science have put forward a lot of models and…
The question What is Complexity? has occupied a great deal of time and paper over the last 20 or so years. There are a myriad different perspectives and definitions but still no consensus. In this paper I take a phenomenological approach,…
Increasingly, biologists are constructing evolutionary trees on large numbers of overlapping sets of taxa, and then combining them into a `supertree' that classifies all the taxa. In this paper, we ask how much coverage of the total set of…
Natural language often contains ambiguities that can lead to misinterpretation and miscommunication. While humans can handle ambiguities effectively by asking clarifying questions and/or relying on contextual cues and common-sense…
The century of complexity has come. The face of science has changed. Surprisingly, when we start asking about the essence of these changes and then critically analyse the answers, the result are mostly discouraging. Most of the answers are…
In this note we suggest that difficulties encountered in natural language semantics are, for the most part, due to the use of mere symbol manipulation systems that are devoid of any content. In such systems, where there is hardly any link…
Patterns are words with terminals and variables. The language of a pattern is the set of words obtained by uniformly substituting all variables with words that contain only terminals. In their original definition, patterns only allow for…
Phylogenetically decisive collections of taxon sets have the property that if trees are chosen for each of their elements, as long as these trees are compatible, the resulting supertree is unique. This means that as long as the trees…
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented. Physical approach, which takes advantage of their extensively quantified mortality, establishes that its dominant fraction yields…
Reasoning about observed effects and their causes is important in multi-agent contexts. While there has been much work on causality from an objective standpoint, causality from the point of view of some particular agent has received much…
In the context of continuous first-order logic, special attention is often given to theories that are somehow continuous in an 'essential' way. A common feature of such theories is that they do not interpret any infinite discrete…
A thorough investigation of the foundations of paraconsistent logics. Relations between logical principles are formally studied, a novel notion of consistency is introduced, the logics of formal inconsistency, and the subclasses of…
In statistics education, the concept of population is widely felt hard to grasp, as a result of vague explanations in textbooks. Some textbook authors therefore chose not to mention it. This paper offers a new explanation by proposing a new…
We introduce a logical framework for reasoning about "uncertain interpretations" and investigate two key applications: a new semantics for implication capturing a kind of "meaning entailment", and a conservative notion of "evidentially…
Natural language processing (NLP) researchers develop models of grammar, meaning and communication based on written text. Due to task and data differences, what is considered text can vary substantially across studies. A conceptual…
The question whether an ontology can safely be replaced by another, possibly simpler, one is fundamental for many ontology engineering and maintenance tasks. It underpins, for example, ontology versioning, ontology modularization,…
People care about decision outcomes and how decisions get made, both when making decisions and reflecting on decisions. But formalizing the full range of normative concerns that drive decisions is an open challenge. We introduce Axiomatic…